Having played through the PL story, I didn’t like the overhauled skill system as much as I’d hoped, but I still want to go back through the main story again. There are still some old sidequests I never got around to as well.
It depends on the implementation, but typically, everyone sits down at the table as equals. No advantages are brought in from collections, unlike constructed formats.
Building a deck is also a separate skill to piloting one. Especially when there is a timer involved, it can be a frantic, fun challenge to draft correctly.
Finally–and perhaps most importantly to me–it takes a long time for draft sets to get “solved” by meta-gaming. There are so many moving parts in new sets that you have to play the game to find out what works. And even if a set does get solved, you’re still having to work with limited options and need a good plan B or plan C.
You’re getting downvoted, but I think there’s something to this, even if it’s not the whole story. The game had a robust presence unnaturally quickly on Tiktok and among streamers. This studio isn’t big enough to have engineered a big campaign, but it’s quite possible they did some small, targeted marketing and it really paid off.
I had a good time with Loop Hero for a while, a few months after it came out. Ultimately stopped running it because it felt like I was never able to pivot mid-run if I found a great drop. Had a “what’s the point of the randomness then?” thought after that and it broke the spell for me. Don’t know if they ever made any changes along those lines.
Mm, “it plays itself” is a common, reductive argument against turn-based combat that I don’t think is helpful.
Otherwise, I think this review is mostly okay for those new to the series (or the genre). Saying that he had a motivated start is interesting, as the story’s notoriously slow start is a frequent complaint about the earlier versions (and the series in general).
It’s good to see a new player in the mix, though the reviewers who are familiar enough with the original games to outline what is missing were the most valuable to me. The missing content makes this a “wait for a sale” purchase for me.
Finished Lost Odyssey over the weekend, and I’ve moved on to Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Torna.
The menus still drive me nuts like they did with the base game, but it’s still fun to wander around. The characters are already growing on me a bit too.
I had a great time with a couple card battlers last year, Cobalt Core and Nitro Kid.
Cobalt Core has a similar presentation to FTL, with a turn-based format instead. Plenty to do in it, great soundtrack, charming writing.
Nitro Kid is on a more traditional 2D grid with an isometric viewpoint. It appealed greatly to my love of 80’s settings, but I’d wait for a sale as it’s thin on content.
Several hours in, I couldn’t even make it to a point where the story started rewarding me. Which was part of the problem. I “cleared” one of the planets (Brittle Hollow), with its platforming elements (something I don’t like in 3D), and my “reward” was a small piece of a puzzle. I needed a lot more than that.
Even before that point, the game hadn’t made a good first impression. There was nothing about the intro section on the starting planet that particularly interested me. And then the ship controls drove me a bit nuts. The loop was the only interesting part about the game for me then.
Felt like the writing was on the wall for me after exploring that first planet, so I dropped it.